The Geographical Dilemmas of Modernity

We find the principal concerns of Geography at the heart of many current political dilemmas.

Environment. People change their environment, but there has been such an acceleration of the intensity of human impacts that we may now speak of a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene. Vegetation cover, rates of erosion, the waxing and waning of glaciers, all these are influenced more by what people do than by the long-term fluctuations of sun-spot activity or any other autonomous physical systems.

Space. The pace and the profundity of the flows within the spaces of globalisation transform the mutual relations between folk in different places . The life chances of people are now so little under the control of their neighbours that all must look to distant events to read the runes of their own prospects.

Place. Globalisation is corrosive of the autonomy of local attachments to place. Feeling that you had once belonged somewhere is too easily dismissed as nostalgia as if the loss were of something that had no possible place in a modern world.